These days, the idea of trying to contact spirits using technology calls to mind those reality shows that send obnoxious “ghost hunters” into abandoned hospitals. But as a new book investigates, the practice has a whole lot more history and nuance behind it than that.

As we’re all essentially just killing time ahead of our inevitable death, Gizmodo this week explored death and deadly things in all of their various forms.

Ghosts can be very scary—if you need recent evidence of this rather obvious fact, set aside several sleepless nights so you can watch The Haunting of Hill House. However, not all spooks are trying to scare the crap out of you. Some of them are pretty cool! Here are our favorite friendly movie ghosts.

There’s a growing, bewildering movement of folks who reject the most basic learnings of science in favor of conspiracy theories and hocus pocus—as a science journalist, I regularly get emails from people who firmly believe the Earth is flat, as shocking as that may seem. I recently chatted with Brian Cox, host of BBC…

Vincent D’Onofrio? Ghosts? Super psychic powers? Meatloaf? Sounds like a recipe for great TV, but it looks like the story of Ghost Wars is going to be ending prematurely.

Many scary movies claim to be inspired by true events, and Winchester has an especially rich history. The enormous, bizarre mansion at its center has long been one of San Jose, California’s biggest tourist attractions. Unfortunately, the story the movie chooses to explore within its walls is utterly predictable.

“Real-life” doesn’t necessarily mean “true,” especially when the context is ghost stories but spooky legends have a way of influencing pop culture, as in the upcoming Winchester starring Helen Mirren. The film is based on the life of a real person who believed spirits were guiding the construction of her mansion.

You live and then you die and then you rot in a hole—or so say the elites, with their glasses, and their PhDs in neuroscience. This bummer reality has never appealed much to Americans, 72 percent of whom believe in some kind of afterlife. It’s a comparatively rarer, though still sizable, breed of American who believe…

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s most recent film is the buzzworthy alien invasion tale Before We Vanish. But the innovative Japanese director (Pulse, Bright Future) has an earlier movie that’s coming out first: 2016 French-language ghost story Daguerrotype.

“If you want this choice position, best not believe in superstition.”

Ghosts are undeniably scary. But if your greatest fear is being trapped in a skin-crawlingly awkward social situation, you may be permanently scarred by Another Evil, a horror-comedy that elevates the concept of “frenemy” to alarming new heights.

One of the most powerful telescopes ever built—NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope—is set to make its big debut in 2018. But before it starts scouring distant galaxies, or searching for life around at TRAPPIST-1, the telescope must undergo quite a bit of testing. Apparently, during “lights out inspections,” James Webb…

The Large Hadron Collider sits underground, spanning over five miles across beneath the bucolic suburbs of Geneva, Switzerland. This metal behemoth serves to try and understand the most basic building blocks of our universe. The question stands, then: if ghosts are real, shouldn’t the LHC have found them?

On December 9, Netflix is dropping a movie that was supposed to be in theaters over the summer. It’s called Spectral, and while all the signs point to it being really bad, the first trailer is really good.

You might think that Halloween stops being fun as soon as the neighbors call you out for being too old to trick-or-treat. But one day, when you have a house of your own, you realize that turning your quaint homestead into a terrifying haunted house makes Halloween infinitely more enjoyable.

For the most part, there’s no wrong way to inhabit a haunted house. See some pissed off ghosts, try not to die, and you’re good. There is, however, one ironclad law that must be obeyed without question: DO NOT FEED THE HOUSE.